Introduction to amoebas and tropical geometry Milo Bogaard 17-2-2015 Master Thesis Supervisor: dr. Raf Bocklandt KdV Instituut voor wiskunde Faculteit der Natuurwetenschappen, Wiskunde en Informatica Universiteit van Amsterdam Abstract In this thesis we give an introduction to the theory of tropical geometry and its applications to amoebas. We treat Kapranov's theorem and Mikhalkin's limit construction for amoebas. We also compute a number of examples. Information Title: Introduction to amoebas and tropical geometry Author: Milo Bogaard,
[email protected], 5743117 Supervisor: dr. Raf Bocklandt Second reviewer: Hessel Posthuma Submitted: 17-2-2015 Korteweg de Vries Instituut voor Wiskunde Universiteit van Amsterdam Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam http://www.science.uva.nl/math Contents Introduction 3 1 Polyhedral complexes and tropical curves 6 1.1 Polyhedral geometry . 6 1.2 The Newton polytope and its subdivisions . 8 1.3 Tropical algebra . 11 1.4 Tropical hypersurfaces . 13 1.5 The Newton polytope of a tropical curve . 15 2 The amoeba of a planar curve 19 2.1 Definitions and examples . 19 2.2 Laurent series . 21 2.3 The amoeba and the Newton polytope . 23 2.4 The components of the complement of the amoeba . 26 3 Puiseux series and Kapranov's theorem 27 3.1 Valuations and Puiseux series . 27 3.2 Tropical polynomials . 29 3.3 Kapranov's theorem . 32 4 A limit of amoebas 36 4.1 The construction of the limit . 36 4.2 The Hausdorff distance . 38 4.3 A neighborhood of the tropical curve . 38 4.4 The limit .